In its combinations of the gestures and techniques of sculpture with those of the installation, Claire Dantzer’s practice is part of a contemporary approach to sculpture: freed of the traditional or modernist concept of the medium, she combines drawing, video and performance as contributors to an investigation into the relationship between physical and mental space and between the sensory dimension of aesthetic experience and its imaginary and cultural one. Dantzer sometimes gives her sculptures explicit symbolic forms – an isomalt vanitas, for example, made up of vividly coloured, translucent skulls and bones – but her recent work stresses a pared-down vocabulary of minimal, abstract shapes, the most recent of which is a glass prism whose numbers, variations, sizes and arrangements depend on the other works on show and the venue. With its transparency, hardness and fragility, and its ability to make the usually invisible spectrum appear in the form of a rainbow, the prism seems emblematic of Dantzer’s interest in intangible phenomena and the possibility of endowing them with a material existence.

Camille Videcoq